


This Curse on Your Lips

by SnitchesAndTalkers



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: 2006, Confessions, Curses, Fighting, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Humour, Let's have some fun with this!, M/M, Magic, Not a soulmark AU, Smut, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 13:48:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14895746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnitchesAndTalkers/pseuds/SnitchesAndTalkers
Summary: Pete is extremely good at keeping his feelings - histruefeelings - about Patrick to himself. He's had five years to perfect the façade, after all.Pete makes a wish the night before his twenty-seventh birthday. Pete crosses paths with a man in the bathroom of a bar in St Augustine. Pete gets himself lumbered with an ancient Obeah curse. None of this seems particularly unusual - he's Pete Wentz, after all.Unfortunately, the effects of the curse skip him entirely. Isn't life (and magic) a bitch?





	This Curse on Your Lips

**Author's Note:**

> So, one year ago today, I posted my first Peterick fic on AO3. It was a stupid, smutty little one shot but it got me back into the swing of things.
> 
> Since then, I've explored various themes including age difference relationships, prostitution, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, sexism and misogyny. I have posted over SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND words of Peterick - at least fifty thousand of which were probably variations of the word "cock" - 20 works all posted in 12 months. 
> 
> Thank you guys, to the ones that have subscribed to my name, the ones that leave comments or kudos, the ones that follow me on Tumblr or the ones that just read along quietly. You guys have got me back into writing, and I can't thank you enough for that.
> 
> That was the first year - here's to many more to come!

_Be careful what you wish for._

That’s the phrase. But Pete is throwing out wishes like they’re bad fashion choices (he’s throwing those out, too, but right now he’s more aware of the wishes, burning like acid through his veins, tossed pennies into pools that spit them back) a down-to-the-bone itch that scratches him inside from out. Pete will shred skin from tissue before it eases up, black nails gored to red with poor life choices stretching back to a suburban porch in Glenview.

The confession burns his tongue day by day, poured into LiveJournal, into blog posts, into pixels and the _taptaptap_ of Sidekick keys in a dark bus bunk. Pete is dreaming in starlight but living in gutter filth because it’s not, it can’t, it won’t.

Pete is dying by degrees and no one seems to notice.

He stares out of the bus window in the witching hour between three and four, after the night owls go to roost but before the early birds are ready to stir for their worm. It’s nothing but him, an anonymous blog post and the standby bus driver, rolling somewhere along between state lines and powerlines. Pete catches sight of an airplane but tells himself it’s a falling star.

Eyes closed, fingers crossed, he makes a wish and taps it out in the glow of his screen.

_ill write you the lyrics if you sing me a song and we can fall in love. notice me._

~*~

Pete is 27 and he’s less pleased about this than everyone else on the tour seems to be.

27 is a dead-end number. 27 is Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. 27 is a club and he’s just been sent a membership card in the form of a freshly issued California state driving licence. Age is making him maudlin and maudlin is making him drink.

This is how he finds himself in a backstreet bar someplace in St Augustine. Truthfully, the reasoning behind celebrating his ability to not walk in front of a bus or fall off something high for another year in St Augustine is as convoluted as it is inexplicable. They should not be here and the timeline feels off with it. The bar itself seems okay, it should be a beautiful building – old, Spanish, double-galleried – but something about it sets Pete’s teeth on edge. His stomach tipturned and his head stuffed full of feathers, he leans against the bar and concentrates on not throwing up.

He must be halfway down the optic of rum secured to the wall. It would explain why the barstool doesn’t feel entirely real under his ass, why his tongue is halfway to numb and his voice drawls slow and sticky when he calls for another. Dirty slings an arm around his neck and offers to pay but it’s Joe’s wallet he’s waving and Patrick’s credit card in his hand. Still, it’s the thought that counts, right?

“Killer party, man,” Patrick slurs, flushed with booze and camaraderie. He slides his thigh onto the stool next to Pete, shifts, pushes off with his toe and comes perilously close to shooting straight over the other side. “God, I’m so – so fuckin’… I’m fuckin’ _wasted_ , dude.”

Flushed red from half-recalled dreams of bunk blowjobs and post-show filth in dressing rooms with his name tacked to the door on cheap printer paper, Pete ducks down into the scant comfort of his hood. Shoulders to ears, he shrugs and traces a shooting star in condensation on the worn wood of the bar. Patrick leans closer, lips kissing distance and sticky-sweet breath tinged with rum as he blinks, unfocused and charming, and smiles a smile Pete wants to see from the opposite end of his pillow.

Pete should tell him, really. Now, while Patrick’s drunk and Pete’s drunk and if it goes wrong then all he’s got to do is blame it on Captain Morgan and his good friend Jim Bean come morning. Instead, Pete tosses back another shot courtesy of Joe or Patrick or whoever the fuck else Dirty has pickpocketed, and shrugs his apathy down at the bar, “Sure. It’s great.”

“Is – is something –” Patrick pauses and blinks, thick lower lip shining soft in the dim light, “– you okay?”

It’s unfair how unaware of himself Patrick is. How he doesn’t seem to notice the painfully charming glitter of sea glass behind thick-framed glasses, the pretty way his hair feathers soft under the brim of his hat, the way his pale knuckles slot together as he folds his fingers one over the other and back again.

Pete isn’t a strong enough man to deal with this right now. “I’m fine,” he grunts, shoving back from the bar, pushing through Charlie, Joe, Dirty, Dan and everyone else pressing into his space like a crowd scene in a John Hughes movie.

The bathroom is too hot. Pete is sweat-sticky and burning as he splashes water onto his face and avoids his eyes in the mirror. 27. This isn’t what he imagined it would be.

“Hey.” Pete jumps; over the clank and groan of the faucet, he didn’t even hear the door swing. There’s a haze through the water caught on his lashes that’s shaped like Patrick. “ _Heeey,_ cranky!”

“I am _not_ fucking cranky,” Pete snaps back, in exactly the tone of voice that a cranky person would use. “I’m… just leave me alone.”

But personal space is not a familiar concept for someone he’s lived with – apartment, tour bus, van – for half a decade and Patrick barrels closer, tripping on brightly coloured Bathing Apes and too many neon-glow cocktails. He stutters into the sinks, hip to hip with Pete and breathing too loud, shoulder bumped to Pete’s as he slurs around a giggle.

“Hey, come here,” he whispers, like he has a secret, beckoning Pete closer with the tip of his jaw. Pete leans in, unwilling for the right reasons but oh so very willing for the wrong ones, drinking in CK One, faint sweat, alcohol and warm skin. Patrick whispers, stage bright and taunting. “ _Cranky_.”

Pete’s fist connects with the mirror before he gains control of his motor functions, anger like instinct as he smashes through glass and watches red spatter silver. Patrick jolts back, twists away then lurches forward, reaching for Pete’s hand even as he hisses a curse at his idiocy. Rage wells, sour and sticky in Pete’s chest, heart beating black under the wrap of a Clandestine hoodie and a glittered pink Hot Topic shirt. He thinks his hand may be broken, skin sliced and sluiced with crimson bleeding out of his veins and into his clothing.

“Get the fuck off of me!” he yanks his hand back, spitting out heartache like he screams out lyrics, “You think you know me, but you don’t know _shit_ , okay? Just leave me the fuck alone.”

“What the fuck, man?” Patrick scowls at him in glass fogged with age and cracked with poor decisions, suddenly sober and furious like he hasn’t been since his ex-girlfriend, since a night of trashed pictures and sobbing boy howling loneliness into Pete’s chest. “I – I’m trying to be _nice_ and you’re – you’re just gonna be a fuckin’ _dick_? Well, fuck _you_ , Wentz, fuck you and your fucking — your girl’s jeans and your — your stupid fucking _birthday_. Stay – just stay the fuck away from me until you figure out what it is crawled up your ass, okay?”

Pete wants to scream it until his lungs ache, until he spits blood and Patrick finally understands. He wants to crawl inside of Patrick’s ribs, sink down into the gore-choked sticky places and make himself at home next to his heart. He wants to curl around him and protect him from anything else that could hurt him rather than being the thing that causes him pain. But instead, Pete snarls. Pete twists his lips into a sneer and flexes his fingers until blood drips from his knuckles to the tile at his feet.

“Fuck _me_? No, fuck _you_ ,” Pete spits as Patrick’s nostrils flare and his eyes glitter. Pete’s chest is kick-drum sore and wounded as he twists the knife deeper, harder. “Go find yourself a girl and quit following me around like a lost six-year-old. Maybe the next one won’t fuck around behind your back.”

Patrick lurches back a step, another, eyes punch-drunk and incandescent as he gropes for the door handle. If Pete is hoping for the parried shot of a below-the-belt insult he’s sorely disappointed. Patrick shakes his head, sighs, “I just want you to be happy, why can’t you ever just act like a _normal_ fucking person and tell me what’s going on inside your fucked-up head?” Then, there’s nothing but the slam of wood on wood as Patrick leaves and Pete is alone.

Or so he thinks.

Movement flashes in the corner of the mirror, some intangible shape shifting dark and noiseless. Is it birdlike? Catlike? Something animal and unsettling, offbeat and out of place in a bar bathroom somewhere in St Augustine. Pete turns, prepared to shoo whatever it is out of the open window.

There follows one of those moments. One of those special kinds of hotcold panic that swirls through insensible throats struck dumb with fear. It’s the off-centre misstep of waking in the middle of a nightmare, lungs too tight and vision contracting to glitter-spot darkness. Pete can’t move or talk or breathe as he pivots on his heel and comes face to face with a man who absolutely was not there a moment ago.

Pete’s first thought is _vampire_!

He shakes that off, buzzed with liquor and low-level hysteria; since they filmed the Sixteen Candles video a couple weeks ago, his first thought is _always_ vampire.

Dark eyes, dark skin, ivory shine teeth grinning in the gloom of the suddenly stuttering overhead light. Outside the door, the music shifts and changes, the upbeat pulse of modern pop giving way to wailing, dissonant saxophone solos, reminiscent of deep south funeral marches that chase shudders along Pete’s spine.

“Shit, dude,” Pete says eventually because the guy is still smiling devilishly and Pete has nothing but charm to defend himself with. “I – I didn’t think anyone else was in here.”

“I’m by the bar when the moon’s full,” the stranger informs him, still grinning. There’s a thread to his voice that Pete recognises from vacations and distant relatives, the sun of Jamaica warming his shoulders as he played in the surf. “That your boy, little man? You having some troubles?”

“He is _not_ my boy,” Pete sneers, heartsick at the stomach-kicking truth of it. Patrick is not, will never be, his boy. Patrick does not, will never, notice him. Not in that way, not in the way that counts. “I should get back – ”

Where there was once a clear path to the door to his right, there is now a grinning stranger. Pete didn’t see him move. His heartrate kicks up from _uncomfortable pre-stage flutter_ to _lowkey cardiac arrest_ as he subtly reaches for his phone in his pocket.

“You calling me a liar?” The man is still smiling but there’s venom there now, unsettling and troubling and creeping into the creases at the corners of eyes like jet. Something flickers in them, something amber and gold and not quite right, something that prickles the hair at the back of Pete’s neck. Pete shuffles back but hits the sink in half a step. “He’s _your_ boy, and the universe don’t like being off balance, little man.”

Okay, so Pete is almost definitely going to die in this bathroom. “Calm down, man. I – I never said you were lying.”

“You write pretty words, little man,” the guy spits around his grin. “Pretty words and pretty poems all for your pretty boy. The universe don’t like being cheated, no sir, she likes everything right and ordered. So, what’re you gonna do?”

“I don’t understand,” Pete isn’t lying, he really, truly does _not_ understand, “Patrick and I are just –”

The man waves a hand and clenches a fist and something clutches in Pete’s chest, something that skitters through his bloodstream and has him shuddering back against the wall. This is not part of the protocol. This is out of his comfort zone and over the rainbow, Kansas long forgotten. Honestly, he’s beginning to question if someone – by which he means _Dirty_ – slipped something into his drink.

“You gotta tell him, bredren,” the man informs him with gravitas that makes Pete distinctly uncomfortable. “You gotta tell him, gotta make that boy understand those pretty words you wrote are all for him. The universe is gonna give you a hand, a little… _poke_ in the right direction. She wants you to do the right thing.”

“Who _are_ you?” Pete asks, caught in a maelstrom of mistrust, hands forming fists like he can fight his way out of this if he needs to.

The man chuckles, sinister, “Oh, I been called lots of things. Your ancestors knew me well, little man. But you… You can call me the Balmist.”

“Hey, so, listen.” This is ridiculous and Pete is painfully done with this shit, shoulder checking the guy and heading for the door. “It’s been fun but you lost me with the mystical voodoo, powers of the universe shit, ‘kay? What is this? Some kind of money spinner for the bar? You gonna sell me some kind of magic talisman that makes my dreams come true? Thanks but no thanks, man. Not interested.”

Three short steps to the door and freedom and the familiarity of his friends. Three steps. Somehow, his legs fold from under him like rubber bands and Pete is tipping down and folding over himself, too loose-limbed and fumbling to bring his hands up to protect his face from the tiles rushing up to greet him. Except they’re not rushing, they’re floating, slow and gradual and echoing with a voice hissed in his ear on a hot breath.

“You made a wish, Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz. You wanted him to notice you. Oh, he’s gonna notice, those pretty words are gonna be _all_ he can think about. One month of the moon, little man, 28 sunsets and there’s no turning back.”

Everything fades to black, the bathroom a collapsing star, and Pete is still falling, still rushing through air and space and darkness like Alice down the rabbit hole. Laughter swirls around him, wraps around his throat fit to choke him, echoing as Pete slips down a crack in the very fabric of the universe. Throat scream-bloody and aching he claws for purchase on nothing, flailing through an absence of being as the man laughs on and on and on. Pete can see his eyes, glowing black to red to brimstone bright. Panic-clawed and desperate he wonders, is this it? Is this Hell?

Did he trip and crack his skull wide open in a strange bathroom thousands of miles from home?

He hits the ground in an explosion of Dante-sharp colour, bloodied hands giving way to Clan-clad arms, all bursting into dust that looks like pixels. Pete shatters away to screaming, a twisted harmony over mocking laughter.

Then, there’s nothing.

~*~

A sledgehammer is beating a tattoo on the tender points of Pete’s temples. There’s no other possible explanation for the way his head throbs in time with his pulse as he blinks awake, hungover and stiff, on the hotel floor. He tests each limb carefully, satisfied that all are present and correct as he curls his fingertips into the pile of the carpet and considers the likelihood of it being drool or blood pooling warm and wet under his cheek.

Blood. Crimson painted to white tiles as they filled his vision, shattered teeth and broken bones and then…

He claws his way upright, head spinning with vertigo as he touches his face with fingertips gentle with disbelieving reverence. He fell. He slipped at the bar in the bathroom and knocked himself out cold and there should be blood and bruising but there’s… there’s nothing.

Memories flood back, surf crashing over him with waves of heated humiliation as he recalls fighting with Patrick, flinging words like weapons, designed to hurt. Apologies are forming at the back of his throat tangled and caught and ready to trickle over hangover-dry lips through a handset until he knows Patrick won’t punch him. He reaches for his phone, hand outstretched and fumbling. He stutters to a stop, slammed to a wall as he blinks down at his right hand in disbelief.

His knuckles aren’t bloodied and raw. They’re absolutely fine. Pete _remembers_ driving that fist into a mirror, he _remembers_ the burst of agony, the snap of self-levelled hatred that burnt his blood black.

And yet, somehow, his hand is fine.

There is no time at all for him to consider this development, for him to cast his net back further through the sea of booze-hazed semi-memories that tickle at the shoreline of his psyche before the shouting starts. It begins somewhere far away, dulled with distance and booming down a hallway, protracted in a way that reminds Pete of echoes down train stations, waiting for the piss trolley in semi-darkness. But it gets closer and louder and flavoured with words like _I’ll fucking kill you, motherfucker_ and _you think this is fucking_ funny _, asshole?_

It sounds disconcertingly like Patrick.

Pete isn’t sure if Patrick even bothers to knock before he involves his feet, toes slamming into the hotel room door until the walls shake with it. He’s rhythmic, inner drummer ticking away with metronome precision as he _slamslamslams_ his foot into the wood over and over.

“Fucking wake up call, Wentz!” Patrick does not sound happy and whilst Pete is willing to accept that perhaps he said some inadvisable, distinctly unfriendly things the night before, this reaction seems both belated and excessive. “Outside, now, you piece of fucking _shit_.”

With a fumble of limbs that don’t want to obey, Pete slips, slides and slithers his way to the door, bracing up against it like he can absorb the force of Patrick’s wrath by the power of osmosis. Stupidly, he says, “Patrick? Is that you?”

“No,” Patrick snarls, sarcastically. “It’s the ghost of Christmas _fucking_ past. Open the fucking door, asshole, I’m gonna kick your ass or break your neck, depends which one I reach first.”

“Patrick,” Pete begins, as the kicking starts again, rhythm replaced with blind fury. His shoulder jolts with each kick, shuddered shockwaves that ring through the roots of his teeth. “I’m not opening the door until you calm down. Look, I know I said some stuff and I’m sorry but —”

The hallway outside falls silent. This is not as reassuring as Pete hoped it might be.

“ _Said_ some _stuff_?” Patrick breathes in a voice laced with fury. “Open. The. Fucking. Door. Or so help me God, I will go downstairs and I will go outside and I will scale the fucking wall to your window. That’s the point we’ve reached.”

Pete suspects that Patrick isn’t lying and so he hauls to his feet and wraps unwilling fingers around the lock, “You have to promise,” he says, wheedling through the wood, “not to hit me in the face. Or the junk. Anywhere else, you’ve got free rein, buddy. Okay?”

“Open the door, Pete.”

“For the kids, Patrick?” he tries, because apparently he hasn’t said enough ridiculously idiotic things in the past twelve hours. “For Andy and Joe? They don’t need to see us fighting —”

“ _Just open the fucking door_!”

The handle eases downward but Patrick catches the motion, twists sharp under Pete’s hand. Skin slipping on sweat-slicked plastic, the edge of the doors slams into him as Patrick pours into the room like a tsunami of blind and furious rage. A shoulder meets Pete’s midsection as Patrick — ever the bull — lowers his head and charges, scooping Pete up as he powers forward and carries them both back and over and onto the mattress.

“Patrick, stop! Calm down! I just —” Hands close around Pete’s throat and he’s choking, gasping, slapping weakly at Patrick’s face as his vision dims. Patrick’s thumbs bite into his windpipe, face contorted, hat and glasses long gone.

“You son of a bitch,” he snarls and Pete thinks that’s probably fair, he’s just not sure last night entirely justifies it as a standalone trigger event. “You motherfucker,” it would be nice if Patrick stopped bringing his mom into this, “you total fucking — _nngh_!”

Patrick crumples, folding down like a house of cards, as Pete brings his knee up and slams it firmly into Patrick’s balls. He’s fighting dirty but lack of oxygen will do that to a guy. They roll apart, opposite sides of the mattress and nursing war wounds as they scowl and hiss insults and half-threats.

Throbbing throat prodded with tender care, Pete snarls across the regulation, mid-price chain hotel comforter, “What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?”

“Wrong with _me_?” Patrick scoffs like Pete is the least funny guy in the band which, considering they’re in a band with Andrew Hurley, can’t possibly be true. “You want to know what’s _wrong_ with _me_? _This_ , dipshit, what the fuck were you thinking?”

Patrick thrusts a hand at Pete’s face and it’s only the lack of formed fist that stops Pete taking another defensive swing at his crotch. Vision filled, contorted and controlled by pale skin rubbed raw and… stained.

At first, Pete thinks it’s sharpie. He thinks someone snuck into Patrick’s room while he was passed out drunk and took to his arm with indelible ink. _The best part of believe is the lie._ For a second, he thinks it’s sort of clever that they’d use lyrics rather than going for the classic cock and balls across a sleep-flushed forehead that Pete himself would have plumped for. Pete is classy like that.

But now it’s Pete’s turn to be pissed off, “You fucking _choked_ me because someone drew on your arm? I could’ve fucking _died_ , dude and —”

“Oh no, asshole, don’t you fucking _dare_.” Patrick’s anger is like a black hole, expanding slowly to absorb things drifting at the fringes of the room. “This isn’t marker, this is a goddamn _tattoo_.”

It’s a what? Pete blinks and struggles upright, yanking Patrick’s arm closer so he can inspect it carefully. If it _is_ a tattoo then it’s beautiful work, bold and flowing in script that looks suspiciously like Pete’s handwriting. It twists around his left wrist, right where his watch will cover it. There’s a bump of a recollection against the hull of Pete’s alcohol-numbed night of misadventure, a whisper of a voice like a curse echoing off the inside of his skull.

 _Those pretty words are gonna be all he can think about_.

Pete swallows, spit and bile and self respect crushed down as he shoves Patrick’s arm away nonchalantly, “It’s fucking sharpie.”

(Truthfully? Nothing about the action is close to nonchalant, the brush of Patrick’s skin to Pete’s is like wildfire, the absence of it something worse. Is it a crush because it breaks things? Because ribs and hearts will crack under the strain?)

Patrick’s breath shakes as he inhales, cuffing damp eyes and damp lips that tremble like he’s fighting back tears. His arm is torn sore, close to bleeding around the lines of dark ink that glow ethereal in morning sunlight filtering through curtains Pete was too blitzed to close the night before.

“I keep nail polish remover in my bag,” he tells the comforter, clearly unwilling or maybe unable to meet Pete’s eyes. “Because you guys are assholes and it gets rid of marker. It’s not coming off. This is _real_ , it’s — it’s fucking _real_ and it’s not funny, man. Who does shit like this? Like we’re 12 and this is a friendship bracelet but it’s not, it’s a fucking _tattoo_ and it’s not just any tattoo, oh no, it’s your fucking bullshit, self-aggrandising, wannabe poet fucking _lyrics_ scarred into my actual fucking _skin_!”

Pete winces from the sucker punch of it, words he wrote with Patrick in mind reduced to teenage poetry. MySpace declarations pinned to his wall and torn to tattered ribbons because Patrick thinks they’re about Jeanae, about Morgan, about anyone but who they’re actually about. Why can’t Pete remember significant details of the night before? There’s something there, some lurking clue while he scrabbles like he’s making puzzles without the reference picture.

“Did you think it was funny?” asks Patrick, somewhat rhetorically. “Get me drunk, get me inked up _just like you_? Did you even check out the tattoo parlour or does fucking _hepatitis_ mean nothing to you? You — you’re a fucking _asshole._ A real piece of shit, you know that?”

This is not a prank Pete would pull. But there are no solid memories there to stand in his defence and the ink across Patrick’s wrist is smeared like a red letter.

“I didn’t do it,” he insists. Patrick gathers his hat, his glasses and his dignity and limps for the door. Pete is sorry about the crotch shot, he shouldn’t have done that. Patrick huffs a laugh that tastes bitter across worn carpet and head-hummed hangovers. “Seriously, man, look at it. It’s not swollen — well, aside from where you’ve clawed the fucking shit out of it — your arm isn’t shaved… that’s — it’s a settled tattoo, Patrick. How could I do that in one night?”

Patrick pauses, pretty lips set in a frown as he stares down at his wrist, fingers twisted loosely around the door handle.

“Just stay the fuck away from me. It’s not fucking funny.”

Pete isn’t laughing. Pete also isn’t remembering, knees drawn to his chest as he scrolls through his Sidekick for some hidden clue caught in poorly pixelated pictures of a night of misadventure. There’s the club they went to straight from the bus, somewhere bright, fast and loud that spins Pete’s limbic system dizzy. There’s a picture, Patrick’s arm around his neck and head on his shoulder — it’s time stamped for some time before eleven and Patrick’s wrist is bare.

Each picture prods a memory, the test of a tongue to an empty tooth socket, impossible to grasp, drifting visions wrapped in fog, staring through steamed mirrors and lying on the bottom of his parent’s swimming pool to watch the clouds scud blurred across endless blue. Nothing he can grasp, nothing that his fingers sink into. A group picture, a different bar somewhere old and lamplit. Patrick’s wrist is bare but his eyes are glazed, Pete mirrors his expression, shot through with liquor as they lean into Andy, bracketing him like bookends. Just before midnight.

Pete remembers nothing about that bar but the whispered throb of words in his ear.

_The universe don’t like being cheated._

Pete has a horrible, sour-tasting feeling that all of this may be his fault entirely.

~*~

True to his word, Patrick avoids Pete for the rest of the day.

They are magnets set at opposing polarities. During interviews Patrick keeps Andy and Joe between them, at lunch and dinner he positions himself with military strategy to keep as much Formica-topped real estate between their elbows as he possibly can without eating his fries out of his lap. Pete tells himself it’ll get better when they’re playing, that the umbilical bond of their music will heal the rift of a cut he doesn’t think he inflicted. He’s wrong.

On stage, as Pete spins into Patrick’s orbit, Patrick slides away, each press of sweaty bodies avoided with side steps and dancing alternate routes via the drum riser. Patrick’s dug out an old wristband, black cotton wrapped over blacker ink like he’s ashamed of Pete’s words. He’s kicked Sophomore Slump off the setlist for the night and that stings Pete sharply enough that he’s sure black eyes and bruised ribs will appear come morning.

Pete never realised what the press of his sweat-slick front to the curve of damp cotton clinging to Patrick’s back meant to him until now. He didn’t notice it was the only time he truly exhaled until the air is burning up his withered, grasping lungs, suffocating from lack of contact as Patrick stares, stoic, across the crowd and avoids Pete’s eyes.

He’s disappeared by the time Pete makes it back to the stage after Saturday, vanished down hallways and lost behind thresholds he doesn’t want Pete to cross. Pete just wants to help, wants to figure out the magic eye puzzle together, to pull it in until it makes sense and they can work it out. Something happened in a bar in St Augustine but Pete’s pulsing, messy thoughts can’t seem to align into anything shaped like sense.

The ironic thing is this; Patrick is the one that straightens these thoughts out, the one that meticulously untangles and unpicks the frayed ends and twisted knots and makes them something smooth and malleable. Who is Pete to turn to when his compass is missing its true north?

On the bus, Patrick is already hidden behind his bunk curtain, his laptop missing from his spot grouped around the table as they split a pizza and shoot the shit.

“What’s wrong with Patrick?” Joe asks, with enough carefully inflected supposition to make his meaning — _what did you_ do _?_ — abundantly clear. He manages to look concerned enough to demonstrate true friendship but bored enough that he can excuse himself from another fun PeteAndPatrick drama should the need arise. Joe is cleverly nuanced like that.

_You wanted him to notice you._

Words skitter like fallen marbles, spider silk brushing cheeks on fall mornings as Pete blinks down at his Sidekick, at the pictures from the night before and shrugs around the fall of his bangs into his eyes. The last picture taunts him, Patrick’s bare wrist and Pete’s smile loaded with all of the things he can’t say. Andy in the centre, bracketed by the weight of friends with a temporary drinking problem he’s willing to indulge despite the fact he’s straightedge.

Wait.

Andy is _straightedge_. Andy was _sober_. Andy was compos mentis when Pete was the exact opposite. He lunges, pizza knocked into Charlie’s lap as he thrusts the phone into Andy’s face and yelps his demand, “What happened after this picture?”

Sidekick handed over, an exhibit for the consideration of a particularly limited jury, Pete waits. Please note that Pete does not wait _patiently_ , foot bouncing and nails bitten, but he waits. Andy looks, Joe frowns, Charlie picks pepperoni from his white shirt and mutters murderous intent through thinned lips, “You owe me a new fucking shirt, dick for brains.”

“I’m not sure,” Andy says, finally, and Pete is calling bullshit.

“I call fucking _bullshit_ ,” he snaps, snatching the phone back and brandishing it out once more. “You were sober and we were wasted — how do you not remember?”

Andy smiles the kind of smile Pete could happily slap from his stupid face, “I never said I didn’t remember. I said I’m not sure. There’s a difference.”

“What the fuck does _that_ mean?” Pete demands, scowl bouncing pong-style between the picture and Andy’s smug, self-satisfied face. “Who died and made you Obi Wan?”

Andy sips his organic, fair trade coconut water and smiles, “I’d say I’m being way more Yoda. Fix it yourself now you must.”

“If you don’t want to help me, just say so,” Pete says, flushed hot with juvenile dislike. “You don’t have to be a fucking dick about it, I’m going to bed.”

Pete lies in his bunk, staring at the ceiling above him. It glows green and soothing, spidered light from glow in the dark stars affixed by Patrick because he read somewhere that they could help kids sleep. It’s never made a difference but it was sweet of him to try. The bus settles around him, retreating steps of bandmates and entourage to slumber like they’ve earned it whilst Pete pays his penance in the glow of the clock on his phone screen. Robbed of sleep and robed in something that tastes like guilt, he tosses and turns, eyes on Patrick’s bunk.

They’re separated by sticky carpet and unwashed socks, by curtains that can block out light but not the shuddering sound of stifled sobs. Patrick is hurting and Pete — always the damsel, never the knight — has no idea how to fix it.

 _He’s your boy_.

~*~

It’s been close to a week.

Five days of hard silence and cold shoulders, five long days during which Pete hasn’t heard Patrick laugh, hasn’t lost himself in the way those eyes crease at the corners. This is a special kind of torture as yet untapped by the CIA or the military. Death by a broken heart inflicted at the hands of unrequited love with a misplaced grudge. Pete has whispered _I didn’t do it_ at bunk curtains, he’s muttered it in hotel lobbies and at sound check as he kicks up dust on another stage in another city.

He murmured it into the shell of an ear during Dance, Dance, hissed syllables breathed as Patrick stood stock still and stared ahead, fixed and unmoving. But Patrick won’t back down and Pete has run out of words to apologise. Words are his currency, his riches hoarded safe from harm — he may not have the ones that Patrick needs, but he has others, more than he knows what to do with. His insomnia is scratched out, weighed and measured in notebook pages filled with gel ink scribbled in pastel colours.

So, consider this; Pete is falling down a tear in the space-time continuum, some next level, Next Generation shit. And whilst Pete has spent a week braced to hit the bottom, a new possibility is terrifying him. What if there _is_ no bottom?

Patrick startles him as he hypothesises in a venue green room, knees to his chest and phone in his hands. Pete scrambles to make room on the couch as Patrick hovers in the arch of the doorframe, fraught with uncertainty and sticky with sweat under a hoodie in mid-June heat, “Can we talk?”

Pete sits, fingers knitted together and eyes on Patrick as he nods, slow and unsteady. Patrick locks the door and crosses the room. He sits with care, unsure of how to arrange himself as he shifts, crossing his leg knee-to-ankle and spreading his hands. Pete aches to kiss him, a bone-deep throb that paints him bruised. He bites his lip instead.

“The — the writing.” Patrick stammers to a stop and takes a deep breath, eyes closed, then continues. “The _markings_. I — there’s more.”

“More?” Pete says, and then continues, “Can I see?”

“Can I show you?” Patrick asks, on the same breath. Pete nods. Patrick nods. Patrick’s smile is fixed, stamped into unmalleable material of lips shaped like curses as he peels off the hoodie.

His right arm is a work of art, a masterpiece of grayscale line art and shading the like of which Pete has never seen before. He reaches for butter-soft skin, cradles the arm in his lap as he pores over it, thumbs grazing the bump of bones at the dip of his wrist. Pete would die for tattoos like this, each word linked with a picture, a beautiful half sleeve wound from poetry that Pete recognises. There’s skill in the work, craftsmanship, though it’s hard to make it out around the scrape of rubbed raw skin. Patrick has scrubbed himself skinned, flesh left flamed and crimson and burning with the smell of acetone.

 _The best part of believe is the lie; you only hold me up like this; kisses on the necks of best friends two quarters and a heart down; wishing to be the friction in your jeans_. Words he wrote for Patrick, poetry spun from unspoken adoration stretching back over five years to basement practices and half-empty community halls, each one illustrated in exquisite detail. He traces his thumb along the handwriting that mirrors his own and glances up.

“It’s your handwriting,” Patrick states, flat as lakewater. Pete nods; he acknowledges that it most definitely is his handwriting. “But I deadbolted my door last night. I laid out cotton around the bed so I’d know if — if you… You didn’t come in, did you?” Pete shakes his head, aching with the memory of a night spent staring at the stars from his hotel window. Patrick chokes on a sob. “What the fuck is happening to me, Pete? I’m — I’m so fucking scared.”

Because Pete has no answers, he shrugs and smiles in a manner he can only hope is reassuring, “I don’t know. But I swear, I’ll fix it. Come on, I saw a first aid kit behind the couch, let’s get some antiseptic on that before it gets infected.”

~*~

They keep coming. Every day there’s more, a new addition laid out in monochrome to stain Patrick’s skin. Sometimes it’s lyrics, sometimes it’s some throwaway sentence Pete tucked into a blog. Disconcertingly, the contents of his private notebooks seem to be finding their way onto the canvas of Patrick’s skin.

Patrick says it started slowly, a new tattoo each time he woke, worked and incorporated prettily amongst the others. It’s been two weeks and he says they’re speeding up, new ones appearing between sound checks and photo shoots. He dresses head to toe in impenetrable material, steps out under stage lights in two t shirts and a button down under his hoodie. He says he can’t bear the idea of someone catching a glimpse.

Pete is unsure if it’s going to be dehydration from the sweat that pours from him, or heatstroke that claims him first.

He applies another layer of antiseptic to Patrick’s broken skin, done with scolding him for rubbing at it like an itch. “We should think about getting some dressings on these.”

Patrick nods slowly, eyeing the alcohol wipes in the first aid kit Pete picked up at a CVS on a soda and shampoo recce. A mental note is tucked away to remove them the second Patrick’s not looking, to toss them in the next truck stop garbage can, buried under soda cans and fast food cartons where Patrick can’t find them.

There’s a new piece already, winding up from his bicep to wrap around his shoulder, snakelike and accusatory; _if i woke up next to you_. Pete hasn’t shared that lyric with anyone yet, he’s barely written it down, the ink almost fresh enough to smudge in a spiral-bound notebook tucked under his pillow for safe keeping. The ink is picking his thoughts up faster than he can control them and he’s close to burning it all; the phone, the notebook, the laptop. Is the next step for the ink to steal the thoughts as he has them, no commitment to any kind of media required?

Because Pete is an idiot, he blurts out the last thing Patrick wants to hear, “Why don’t we tell the guys?”

“No.” Patrick folds his arms across the once pale skin of his chest. It’s peppered with tattoos now, feathered with the red-gold hair that smatters his upper body.

“But,” Pete says, pleading. Andy said this was Pete’s mess to fix but maybe, perhaps, if he realises the impact this is having he might relent, might shed some light on the darkness of a bar Pete barely remembers. “Maybe they’ll have some ideas? I mean, maybe if we just talked to Andy — ”

“Something happened on your birthday,” Patrick blurts out in a rush, slipping his button down back on once Pete is done rubbing the sharp scent of wintergreen into his skin. “I — I followed you into the bathroom and you were a jerk and then… and then… _fuck_ , why can’t I fucking _remember_? What happened in that bar?”

“I don’t know,” Pete is caught between a little white lie and fatalistic honesty. Patrick is right, something happened, something went down but he can’t remember, he doesn’t know, he —

_You gotta tell him._

Spine iced and lungs frozen, Pete stares at Patrick. He can neither move nor blink as Patrick stares back, lush lipped and ethereally beautiful. Tell him? Is that the key? Confess that every syllable was for him, that every time he blamed a girl, blamed the world, for Pete Wentz drama it was all centred squarely at a shy little kid with a golden voice?

“I... ” Pete begins. Patrick scrambles to him on eager knees, nails biting pressure into his shoulders through the inadequate armour of his hoodie and home-printed shirt. “Maybe…”

“Yeah?” Patrick prompts, a tiny shake delivered with trembling hands. “What? What do you remember?”

 _I love you_ , Pete rolls his tongue into the shape of the syllables that have struck him dumb for five years. He tastes the syruped sweetness of them, flexes them in his throat, box fresh and made to order. He imagines the way Patrick will smile at him, sad around the eyes and brittle with the _I don’t see you that way_. He contorts the crystal ball until it shows him a future of awkward silences and avoided eye contact, the vision of a Patrick that fears his affection.

This is not a risk Pete is willing to take. “Forget it. I don’t remember anything.”

~*~

Pete is woken by the shape of Patrick’s lips to the head of his cock. Hand sunk into honeygold hair, he groans approval at the glow in the dark constellations pasted to the roof of his bunk as Patrick mouths over the blood-gorged length of him. He spreads his legs and cants his hips and welcomes the way a hot, wet tongue laps at his balls over the cotton of colourful hipsters.

He casts about for something elegant to say, some eloquent declaration that he’s stored in the pages of his notebook, the posts of his LiveJournal but instead he comes up with this: “Fuck, Patrick. Don’t fucking stop.”

The chuckle from between Pete’s legs drifts through the bunk like smoke. Patrick doesn’t stop. Shorts eased down, he licks from the base to the sticky-crowned head, mouth sinking down like he was shaped for Pete’s cock. This is not a blowjob like any other Pete has experienced, this is careful deliberation, mouth and hands and eyes glittering in the darkness as Patrick sucks his way down his cock.

“Me for you,” Pete whispers into the eerie, green glow of his artificially illuminated bunk. He can’t last long as Patrick slides a finger inside of him, stroking stuttering nerve endings until he finds that spot. “It’s only ever me for you, I swear.”

A hot, wet mouth and curled tongue, fluttering  butterflies stuttering shockwaves along the length of his spine, down to the curl of his toes against the sheets. This is beyond physical sensation, some deep pulsed need in the base of his skull that throbs out with his bloodstream and Pete is… Pete will…

Pete jolts awake, crotch wet and lungs heavy, arching up for contact that isn’t there as the last pulsing tingles subside. Shivered sick with guilt, he waits for his pulse to slow, for his breathing to regulate. He hasn’t had a wet dream in a decade and this one is simply something else to feel guilty about, another way his thoughts twist and warp to violate Patrick. He swings from his bunk and pads on bare feet to the place they store their bags, a quest for clean shorts and Gatorade halted by the sight of Patrick, sprawled across the couch in open-mouthed slumber.

His laptop is a mess of open search pages, a litany of questions fired at Google, at Yahoo!, at fucking _Ask Jeeves_ so acute is his desperation. The shadows under his eyes look worse in the blazed-bright glow of his laptop screen, the sheen of sweat on his brow breaking Pete’s heart as he lies there in his hoodie in ninety-degree heat.

It would be easy enough to wake him now. To nudge his shoulder until he blinks awake and whisper his confession in the dark. Pete is a seasoned all-star in taking rejection and yet he’s still stung raw by the fear of it.

He eases down the zipper of Patrick’s hoodie and redirects a portable desk fan to cool him, stomach crippled with guilt as he slips back into his bunk. Pete is a coward no matter the time of day.

He doesn’t sleep, can’t sleep, greets the dawn with his phone and a couple of demos posted to blogs because he needs the interaction. At the venue, it’s there. Stained between Patrick’s shoulder blades like a screaming accusation as Pete checks him over for new ink in the harsh light of a shitty dressing room.

“Are there any more?” Patrick asks, with more misplaced hope than he has any right to have.

Pete can’t talk, can simply stare, slack-jawed and bug-eyed at his handwriting outlined by Van Gogh swirls of a starry night, a post-impressionist canvas of the roof of Pete’s bunk.

 _Me for you_.

Pete is sick, swirled dizzy and uncoordinated as he staggers back and trips over his own shoes. He recalls the dream, the press of Patrick’s hot, wet mouth around the friction burn sting of his stiffened cock. He remembers the throb of it as he fell apart, the words that tore from the back of his throat as Patrick moaned around him.

“Is there any more?” Patrick demands, head craned like he can dislocate his shoulders to take a look. “Would you just fucking _tell_ me?”

Pete holds up a mirror and lets him see, aching sore at the way his shoulders slump and his eyes dim dull, “Which girl is that for?” he asks, and Pete can no longer look at him.

If this thing has crept, insidious, into his dreams, if he no longer has to commit the words to print, if he no longer has to consciously _think_ them, then there’s no escape for either of them. As Patrick dresses once more, Pete whispers reassurance that no longer rings true.

The words are stolen from his lips as it hits him like a truck, like a storm, like a palpable, unstoppable force. He thinks he gasps, knocked off his feet and to his knees by the force of it, all air swept from his lungs as he slumps, winded, to the floor.

_You made a wish, Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz. You wanted him to notice you. Oh, he’s gonna notice, those pretty words are gonna be all he can think about._

He remembers it now. Wishing on an airplane that could be a star, typing out a text to a universe that had never listened before, ember-bright eyes and laughter that locked his throat as he fell down a hole that seemed endless but spat him onto a hotel room floor.

He made a wish.

Now how the fuck does he _un_ make it?

~*~

Pete is running out of ideas almost as fast as he’s running out of hope, trading semi-sensible suggestions for riddled nonsense kicked up by insomnia. Pete can’t, daren’t, sleep. Release lodged in notebooks and pixels has been stolen from him and replaced by a mind he fights desperately to keep entirely neutral. It’s a battle he’s losing and the handwriting that loops over Patrick’s skin is growing frantic, choppy, teeter-tottering on the brink of Renfieldesque insanity.

It’s a snatched thought here, a sentence picked from a nightmare there, words his fingers itch to write. He’s trying, he’s trying _so fucking hard_ , to keep it under control but the words leach from him like spilled ink, creeping across insidious airwaves to lodge in Patrick’s skin.

Patrick is drawn pale and pinched, eyes like riptide rimmed with storm clouds as he measures out the nights next to Pete, convinced if he doesn’t sleep, doesn’t take his eyes off the full body canvas the curse has left him with, then maybe it won’t happen.

They appear as the two of them watch.

It’s been three weeks now and Patrick’s upper body is a solid showpiece from throat to wrists to hips. In any other circumstance Pete would tell him it looks good on him. As he watches him shrug into another long-sleeved, crew-necked, button-downed, hoodied, jean-jacketed suit of armour for another show he no longer looks as though he wants to play, Pete chooses to keep his observations to himself.

Patrick sighs, “I look ridiculous.”

That is an observation that can never be true. “No way, man! It’s cool, very…” he gestures at flannel and denim. “Nirvana. 90s grunge is due a revival.”

“What’s happening to me?” he asks again. “This is _you._ You must know.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Pete lies by omission once more. This is better, isn’t it? The tattoos aren’t so bad, Patrick can get used to them in ways he can’t align himself with Pete’s emotions. “We’ll just keep looking.”

Patrick sighs, eyes down on the floor as he runs his thumb along the monochrome of his forearm. “I can’t do this, man. I can’t keep going out there wearing your words for all those girls like a cheap suit. I’m gonna take some time after this tour, try to figure shit out, figure _me_ out, I don’t know where I am or what I want. Not anymore.”

“Are — are you _jealous_?”

There is a beat of time, a moment of the continuum where Patrick tenses entirely. Pete grasps at the words to twist what he just said in the right way, to turn it from an accusation into a question.

It shatters, blown to dust and nothingness as the curve of Patrick’s jaw juts sharp, as his lips thin and his brows draw low and he snarls, hissed wet with fury, “ _Jealous_? What, you think one bad breakup and I want what you have? You? The fucking master of fucked up relationships? Don’t fucking flatter yourself.”

Pete didn’t mean it like that, he’s not continuing to fire below the belt like he did in the bathroom of a bar he can barely remember. It seems that if there are two potential options, two directions for his words to swing like a pendulum, then they will always be perceived in the wrong way entirely with unerring regularity.

But if he didn’t mean _that_ , then what did he mean?

“I didn’t mean –”

But Patrick is already gone, an echo of an accusation in an empty room. Pete pulls out a sharpie, cap caught between his teeth as he rolls up his t-shirt and scrawls across his hip; _im supposed to love you._

It’s an act of rebellion, defiance spat into the face of a curse designed to taunt him. He raises his middle finger at the mirror and dares the universe to respond. Tonight, Pete will scream each word he wrote for Patrick into the ether and tomorrow…

Maybe tomorrow, he’ll do the right thing. For now, he’ll do the thing that hurts him the least.

~*~

Pete hasn’t slept in three days. Not really. Not if no one’s counting fitful half-naps snatched on couches that smell of the sweat of every band that’s passed through the venues before them. Not if no one’s counting the moment he nodded, heavy-eyed and stupefied, face down into a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Not if no one’s counting the moment he drifted as Patrick slept slumped into his side.

He’s not counting any of those things – half-dead and dreamless – so he’s not sure anyone else should.

Patrick will no longer show him the tattoos. He twists excuses around cheeks stained red and eyes darting to every corner of the room. Pete can’t begin to comprehend what’s appearing, his thoughts deranged and desperate, his dreams crawling into the edges even when he’s awake, bitter and twisted and ugly.

Caught in a corner, rabbit in headlights and hands splayed to drywall, he dodges away as Joe chases him down. This time, Joe’s words aren’t minced, “Dude. What the fuck did you do to Patrick?”

 _I got cursed and painted him with my thoughts. It’s cool though, I think I just have to confess my love, fuck up the band, our friendship and, by extension, my life. No big deal._ He can’t say that out loud, Joe will think he’s crazy. _Er_. Joe will think he’s _crazier_.

“I don’t know.” Blue eyes blink like they don’t believe him, but Pete suspects he wouldn’t believe the truth, either. “Maybe heading back into the studio is stressing him out. You know how he gets, he’s such a fucking diva _artiste_ , when he’s feeling creative.”

“Hmm,” Joe hums, speculatively. “And the clothes?”

Pete decides to play dumb. “The clothes?”

“He’s wearing ten layers when it’s 85 degrees out,” the tone of Joe’s voice suggests he finds Pete’s lack of extrospection entirely plausible – this is insulting although there’s something to be said for projecting the image of a self-absorbed asshole, “even you have to admit that’s slightly… unorthodox. We could bottle what’s running off him during a show and sell it to kids on MySpace, God knows, there’s enough of it. _Two_ jackets, man. _Two_. That’s excessive, even by his standards.”

“I can fix it,” Pete declares, though he has no idea how.

Joe narrows his eyes and takes a long, speculative sip from the cardboard cup clutched in his hand, “I thought you didn’t know what was wrong. How can you fix it, if you don’t know the problem?”

“How did Einstein find the Theory of Relativity?” Pete hits the ground running and grabs the gauntlet on the way down. “How did Beethoven write music when he was deaf? How did the dude who split the atom know he could do it?” his analogy is stretched to breaking point, “The point is – the point _is_ – I can fix this. I don’t know how. But I’ll do it.”

Joe looks less than convinced. This is not reassuring.

“If you say so –”

 _The Balmist_.

It echoes through Pete’s mind, the call of a drum pounding dissonant against his ear drums, the scream of the crowd that steals the breath from his lungs, the prickle-sting of electricity in his spine when Patrick smiles the smile reserved for him. The Balmist.

“– dude?” Joe’s voice tunes through the fog, the stifled hum of blood in his veins, of distant crowds and stuttering starlight through clouds. Pete blinks, stares, shivering hot with fever as his lips form the words over and over again. “Pete? You’re freaking me out, knock twice on the table if you’re having a stroke, man. Can you raise your legs? Wait, no, it’s arms, right? Dude!”

“I’m fine,” Pete whispers to his shoes, head over heels and strung out like he’s high, beautifully lacking lucidity from unrequited love and untaken sleep. “I’m just fine.”

~*~

The Internet is incredible, Pete’s always thought so. Aside from that moment a few months back when the sheer size and scope of its reach was demonstrated by an ill-advised dick pic smeared across gossip sites. But really, the concept of the world wide web is incredible; all human knowledge contained in a device that sits comfortably on the palm of his hand and until this point, he’s mostly used it to look at funny pictures of cats. But right now, LOL cats can wait. Pete is a man on a mission of mercy, a man with a name and a loose plan that involves him saving the day.

Pete is researching and Pete has discovered a wealth of websites summoned by Google to answer his call for knowledge in relation to the Balmist.

Pete is researching and Pete has discovered Obeah, the myth and legend of spirits summoned and cosmic balance endeavoured and followed by his ancestors as far back as the Igbo in Ghana.

Pete is researching and Pete has decided that the Balmist can kiss both his left and his right ass cheek. A medicine man or a wizard with a grudge, either way, Pete feels unfairly called out when he did nothing more than argue with a pasty blonde kid in a bar in Florida. Cosmic realignment is somewhere several light years beyond Pete’s remit.

Pete is researching, and Pete has come up with the sum total of sweet fuck all about how to actually _fix_ this.

Is it four days or five since he last slept for more than thirty minutes at a time? Reality is shifting around him, his world strung out like the Matrix is glitched as he blinks eyes that burn and calls up another search engine. Patrick is slipping in and out of lucidity on the couch next to him, stumbling to and from consciousness with twitching fingers and bloodshot eyes.

“Rest,” Pete begs, the others long gone to their bunks. “Come on, man, they’ll show up either way. Please, just sleep.”

“You _know_ ,” Patrick whispers, soft as breaking hearts. “You _know_ how it feels to lose control of yourself. Something else is behind the wheel right now, something in your head and on my skin and I can’t — I can’t switch off when I know that’s happening.”

Pete sighs, “I understand that.” The keys of his Sidekick click under the pressure of traitorous thumbs that know the truth. Patrick breathes in and out, in and out. “But, still…”

“You asked if I was jealous,” he says, under his breath, under Pete’s ribs and down to the pulsing wet throb of his heart. “What did you mean?”

Pete meant that he wanted Patrick to imagine himself as the subject of the prose scrawled across his skin. He meant that he wanted Patrick to understand his position in the songs that he sings every night to a crowd of kids that — if the message boards are close to correct — have figured it out far sooner than he ever will. The _I love you_ , twists bitter as blood at the tip of his tongue. He bites into his lip until he tastes copper and stares down at the screen.

“I didn’t mean anything. I — I’m an asshole. You should know that by now.”

It’s the last day of the tour, three weeks and a handful of days since the first tattoo appeared, and Pete is running out of options.

~*~

Guilt has plagued Pete for the entirety of his adult life. Act first, speak first, do first, feel sorry later. That’s how he’s lived, hardfastloud and no consideration for consequences until they’re staring him in the face.

(Or screaming at him through cell phones and across state lines during three in the morning breakdowns and breakups. He’s good at that, too.)

In an airport in California, as far as they can get from St Augustine without requiring a visa, Patrick fiddles with the zipper of his backpack and mops the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. He’s wearing a scarf now which raises eyebrows from Andy and questions from Joe, swatted aside with irritation and headphones tugged over his ears. Next stop Chicago and rest time and nothingness until they hit the ground running with festivals and studios and the promise of a third album that Pete’s too terrified to write.

Their flight is called and Patrick climbs to stuttering feet, tripping on tiles like he’s half-cut and stumbling. He crashes to the wall, folds to the floor and wheezes gasping breaths that Pete mirrors without thinking, skidding to his knees and fumbling for Patrick’s inhaler.

“Deep breaths,” he soothes, stroking hair sticky with sweat from a brow misted and hot. Patrick shake-click-breathes once, twice, then slumps into Pete with a sob stifled around the bite of his lower lip.

“I can’t do this.”

Three words. A triplicate of pain that Pete could rectify with three words of his own. At this point, he’s beginning to wonder if the payoff of potential Patrickisation resuming as per standard issue is worth the downfall of losing everything he holds dear. He could tell him, just whisper the words into his ear and make it all go away. That’s what the Balmist said, that’s what he promised, that’s… probably a huge crock of bullshit now Pete’s thinking about it.

_I’m by the bar when the moon’s full._

Shivered from sensibility, Pete blinks, shakes his head as though the Magic Eight ball will change. What did that cosmic motherfucker even _mean_? If leaving seems stupid then staying seems stupider, Pete needs to act; now, yesterday, three and a half weeks ago. Shoulders squared and bag abandoned, Pete straightens his shirt and shoves his wallet a little further down into the hip pocket of jeans liberated from the feminine side of the department store.

“Take care of him,” he tells Andy.

“Where are you going?” Joe calls, plaintive accusation from a man who has, thus far, barely glanced up from his magazine. “Hey, bring me back chips?”

Pete has an impulse that he’s sure is a bad one, but he’s out of good, or even passable, ideas as he stumbletripruns his way through LAX to the check in desk of American Airlines.

The man behind the counter smiles at him with a thin veneer of professionalism pasted over a deep-rooted hatred of the _customer_ part of _customer service_. “Can I _help_ you?”

“I need a ticket,” Pete declares, as though this is a surprising development at this, the ticket desk in an airport.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the man drawls, tapping keys and apathetic smile. “We’re fresh out.” Pete is too fucked fraught and exhausted to do more than blink at him. He sighs. It is not a patient sound. “Where to?”

“St Augustine,” Pete slaps his AMEX onto the desk between them. “Direct.”

“Oh.” If the man is impressed by Pete’s credit card status (in honesty, _Pete_ is still very much impressed that someone with visible documentation of his previous credit score trusts him with a credit card) then he does an excellent job of disguising it with sarcasm. “What a shame! No direct flights until Tuesday.”

Today is Friday. Pete grits his teeth, this is a quest of the heart, he can bear the discomfort. How bad can a layover be?

“I need to get there as soon as possible,” he flashes a couple of twenty dollar bills like he’s the lead in a Quentin Tarantino movie, the guy behind the desk remains unimpressed, “can my friend Andrew Jackson persuade you?”

“No.”

This dude is _not_ making things easy. “Come on, man. There must be _something_?”

“I can send you to Dallas, then on to New York, up to Calgary then down to Orlando and then,” keys flourish _taptaptap_ , “ _then_ it’s a hire car,” Pete nods and slides the card forward, “that’ll be three thousand, five hundred dollars and fifty-eight cents.”

“Thirty-five _hundred_ dollars!” He hauls the card back towards himself instinctively.

“And fifty-eight cents.”

Really, truly, what choice does he have?

~*~

St Augustine is different in daylight, or that’s what Pete tells himself as he circles block after block in search of the bar that started this mess. His phone is a shuddering pulse of incoming texts, calls and emails; people at the label, people he calls friends, people he calls Patrick, all ignored. All shoved aside and drowned out with the ringtone pushed lower and lower until Beating Heart Baby gives way to vibrate and the accusatory glow of the screen from the passenger seat.

He recognises this intersection, the club on the corner where they started their night, the sidewalk he used to prove he could moonwalk (he couldn’t, can’t, he just wanted the run of the canned laugh track, the glowing sign above his head demanding AUDIENCE APPLAUSE). There’s a stop sign ahead, pedestrianisation or urbanisation or something unwelcome that he doesn’t recall. He swings the car into a parking spot and jogs along the asphalt, convinced that at any second he’ll see it; squat and square and old and…

No.

No, that can’t be right. This is the right town, the right block, the right street. This _should_ be the right lot but instead of Spanish splendour there’s — there’s fucking _nothing_. An overgrown lot, lost to vegetation too lush to be anything but established by decades of abandonment, winding greens and golds and rich, blood reds where Pete remembers stucco walls and a heavy wooden door.

“No,” he hisses, fists slammed to chain link rusting in tropical humidity and hung with a sign that declares BEWARE. “No, no, no, _no_!”

This must be the wrong street, he decides, teetering on the brink of panicked hysteria, brain starved of oxygen — starved of sense — as he trips on numb toes like he’s falling. He searches the next street, the one after that, runs and pounds his feet into summer-soft asphalt until his breath lodges wet-sticky in his windpipe and all he can do is crumple to the floor and weep.

This is a nightmare, a terror screaming from his subconscious, stalking him from dark places as he runs and searches for exits that don’t exist. Pete is not in St Augustine. He’s passed out on the plane and drooling on the shoulder of the  nice middle aged lady he sat next to and poured out his heart, his guts, his hidden secrets because there was no one else around.

She patted his hand and told him that Patrick seemed like a _lovely_ boy and if he just went home and straightened this out… She was nice. She didn’t seem like the kind to get annoyed over a little bit of shoulder drool between friends.

All he has to do is wake up.

Pete tries every trick. He pinches himself raw, until the skin of his wrist flames swollen-sore and red. He slaps himself, hard, across the face. He does it again. If this isn’t a dream then the crimson shadows of his palms are a nice touch to the overall look of Crazed Hobo that his reflection in store fronts and car windows tells him he’s rocking. It’s an idea for the next Clandestine run.

Finally, he screams, stage-style and desperate, at himself in a car mirror, imploring himself to wake the fuck up until his throat breaks and cracks. There’s a distinct no fly zone cast around him in the throngs of staring tourists. It doesn’t work. He is definitely, absolutely awake. Abandoned phone retrieved like lost loot, he speed dials everyone he knows, trapped in an unending, Orwellian loop of _please leave a message._

“Andy,” he barks for the fourth time into the endless void of voicemail. “This is fucking serious, man, I need you to call me back. The bar in St Augustine, do you remember the name? The address? _Anything_? Call me back. Now.”

Sweat-sticky and broken, unwashed clothes, lank hair and face stained with a week’s worth of eyeliner that does nothing to hide the shadows like starless skies under his eyes, Pete lowers his head into his hands and sobs. There is no way he can sink lower than this, no alternative left now to salvage his friend and his friendship. Pete is several thousand miles from home and broken down the centre entirely with the guilt of words he can’t verbalise. He is a quiet, sad place, haunted by the bleed of cursed artwork staining Patrick’s skin.

As though to prove him wrong, Florida delivers her final fuck you in a deluge, a flash flood, rain soaking sidewalks and shivering bassists huddled against chain link.

He has no idea how long he sits and cries into the cuffs of his hoodie. Long enough that he soaks through cotton and stains salt to his skin from fingertips to elbows. Long enough that the tourist crush gives way to twilight stillness, caught in the bubble between sights to see and cocktails to drink. Long enough that, when the rain subsides, afternoon sunlight slants through to an ebbing tide of darkness that folds around him, tucked away and drawn up knees-to-chest. Pete is swollen around the eyes and frozen around the heart, a thousand different endings to the fairytale he’s crafted catching dark and twisted in his mind.

A shadow sweeps the sidewalk, darkness velvet-deep and pulsing. Something drifts, papery-thin and fluttering, into the gap between his sneakers.

 _Vampire_! Pete thinks.

No, wait. He’s thought that before, white tiles and warped mirror, rage in his chest and apologies tripping from the back of a bitter tongue.

He fumbles for the note, unfolding with fingers numb with panic and cramped from being wound into his hair. He smooths it against his thigh, tear-blurred vision blinking down unfocused at ink shaped like his handwriting, like the scrawl that covers Patrick’s skin, like the loop and fold and scratch of letters that blind him with panic from single ruled, spiral bound notebooks picked up in packs from office supply stores.

_one sunset left. no refunds. no take backs. no chance to exchange. one night to obsess over living — or obsess over him — then there’s no turning back. what are you waiting for? kiss him! kiss him!_

Feet found before balance, he staggers in the direction of the man, the familiar shape of shoulders he almost remembers, moving away from him down the block. He fumbles on feet fizzed with pins and needles and pitches into a wall, voice ripped sore from his lungs over vocal cords cramped with desperation, “Hey! Wait up!”

Whoever it is they move fast as moonlight, silent as stars, extending the distance between them without increasing the rhythmic thump of their feet against asphalt. Pete is sprinting, soccer trained and furious, as he extends each step like Springheeled Jack.

“Stop!” he screams like his lungs will break. “ _Wait_!”

Whoever it is, wearing darkness, they don’t look back.

They’re approaching the intersection, streetlights and laughter, bars and vacation bonhomie. The man turns left without looking back, lost behind buildings as Pete hurls himself, skidding on gravel and grasping need as he skitters around the corner.

“Hey! _Wait_!” he slams straight into a dead end, another empty lot, another chain link fence. Nose sore and knees grazed, he blinks at the link and loop of rusted metal then down at the note in his hand. Pete howls his rage at the round, subtropical moon, glowing bright and half a hair from full.

There’s no one there and nowhere for him to have gone.

One sunset. He needs to get back to Chicago.

~*~

Pete won’t rehearse his speech on the flight from Orlando, blinking into the blaze of midday sunlight glinting off the wings of another passenger plane. He refused to sleep in the airport, pacing a route around rigid chairs and slumbering toddlers on parents laps as he recited soccer stats out loud to keep his mind from drifting.

He can only hope this curse is specific to the whole “secretly in love with Patrick” thing or else the kid is going to be covered in Real Madrid’s free kick records for the past three decades.

It’s been fifty-seven hours since he last slept. Hallucinations are blurring reality, tearing apart each feathered seam as he floats onto the plane, collapses into his seat and prays hard for an obnoxious toddler to spend the whole flight kicking the shit out of the back of his seat. But Pete is not a lucky man, reduced to humming — loud and offkey — slamming the heel of his hand into his temple to drive away exhaustion.

“Sir?” An air hostess with a professional smile leans over his seat. “You’re… _confusing_ some of the other passengers. And, uh, _worrying_ the air marshal.”

He resorts to driving the points of his fingers into the meat of his thigh, pushpinch until he feels the bruises bloom beneath dirty denim. He’s barely in control, hanging by a thread. He can do this, he can fight sleep for another couple of hours… He can count it in minutes, measure it out in ticks of a watch he doesn’t wear. Blinking seems slow, each upward haul of eyelids torturous, breathing deep and lethargic. Just a while longer, he can do it…

He can…

Pete dreams of the shape of Patrick’s hands to his hips.

~*~

Patrick’s house is the same as it always is, brown brick and blue Honda Civic, neat and sensible in all of the ways Pete’s apartment explodes with insanity. At first, he knocks, thudthumptap at the door, the low hum of Bowie indicative of the presence of its owner.

Patrick doesn’t answer.

Pete upgrades to ringing the bell, to yelling through the window panes, but nothing stirs within. He shouts down the the soundwaves of his cellphone, pleading and begging with the encroaching threat of the setting sun.

“Patrick, _please_ , open the door! I can _fix_ this, but I need you to open the door! _PLEASE_!”

Finally, he considers the door like a physicist, calculating weight, tensile strength and wind speed as he backs up, hops on the spot once, twice, three times and takes a run, shoulder dropped. He doesn’t realise the door has opened until he crashes into the bottom of Patrick’s staircase. Spun dizzy and strung out, he blinks up at the ceiling and checks for loose teeth with his tongue until Patrick’s concerned face fills his vision.

“Patrick,” he begins, “hi.”

Patrick blinks at him. “Shit, are you okay? Are you, uh — are you _bleeding_ from, like, any place?” 

“That,” Pete informs him, convinced that yes, he is bleeding from several places, “is not up for discussion. I have something to… tell… you…”

He trails off, robbed of breath as he struggles to sit against the bottom stair, eyes on Patrick hanging out in his house in a hoodie — hood up — scarf and gloves. Tender hands take the length of Patrick’s fleece-clad fingers, peeling away the layers to reveal skin stained from wrists to fingertips, ink snaking away beneath the cuffs of his hoodie.

There’s more beneath the scarf, _im sorry im sorry im sorry im sorry_ , twisting up below his ears and brushing along the length of his hairline, barely legible scrawl, babbled thoughts twisting over one another and inlaid with images stolen from Pete’s dreams.

“It got — worse,” Patrick admits, eyes on the floor. “Around lunchtime. There’s none on my face yet but… like… it’s everywhere else and I guess, uh, I guess it’s only a matter of time. I don’t know what’s happening, but —”

There are no available options left. Pete is out of ideas, the rose gold glow of the sun sinking low in the sky beyond the window a reminder that he’s also very much out of time. There is no alternative remaining, no easy route with the simplicity of the friendship that fell before. It’s do or die, and Pete, spurred on by the lyric poking from Patrick’s collar, will go down swinging.

“I can make this stop.” He’s not sure that’s the truth but he’s a desperate enough man to hope. “I can make it go away but I need — I need you to promise you won’t hate me.”

That’s not fair, he can’t make this conditional to acquiescence for a scenario Patrick can’t comprehend. But Patrick nods and Pete breathes deep, holds it in his lungs, hands somehow still wound with Patrick’s, two lost boys on a restored hardwood floor in a townhouse somewhere in Lake View.

Pete exhales, opens his eyes and begins, “I need you to know that — that I care about you and, uh, that — that I’d never do anything that might, you know? Hurt you.” He fumbles to a stuttering stop, choking on words that don’t want to come. He’s written a novel for Patrick in pretty prose, two novels, three, unending tomes wrapped around music and sung over crowds every night. Why can’t he gather them now? Rally them, control them to the shape of his lips?

“Right?” Patrick nods, slowly, this is clearly not the solution he imagined. “Go on…”

With no clear path in mind, Pete does just that. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, we are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”

“Why,” says Patrick, reasonably, “are you quoting Moonstruck at me?”

“Am I?” Pete blinks — the sky is darker now, clinging to daylight by a whisper of a breath. “Okay, well, I guess I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you.”

“That’s Dirty Dancing.”

“God _dammit_!” Where are the _words_? Why can’t he conjure up the honeysweet version of what he wants to say? “I guess, really, I’m just a boy, standing in front of… another boy. Asking him to —”

“Notting Hill,” Patrick pulls his hands free and gestures to the door. “Look, could you just, uh — could you _go_? Please? I’m — I’m wearing your thoughts on my fucking _skin_ like some kind of fucked up Silence of the Lambs remix — I have fucking _thoughtskin_ —  and... and I’m not in the fucking mood for this right now. Just go. Go home.”

Pete is dumbstruck and falling, slipping on his knees across the floor. Arms around Patrick’s waist and cheek to the shuddering softness of his stomach, pressed close enough to pretend he can hear his heartbeat, Pete closes his eyes and lets the words flow.

“I love you. There, I said it. I have loved you, do love you, _will_ love you for as long as I’m fucking breathing. You’re part of me, you’re my lungs, my guts, my lovefucked heart and everything else. You’re the thing that stops the rotten in me, the thing that keeps part of me shining when everything around me wants to make me rust. I’m — I’m fucking _Ponyboy_ just staying gold for you. Everything on your skin, I wrote for you, every word, every thought. You sing songs about us _every_ night because… Because I fucking love you, I — I…”

Trailed to a halt, Pete blinks open heavy eyes, imagining the silence is awed, that the ink is receding and Patrick is glowing golden like a Disney movie. But the ink is still there, still taunting him, twisting further along Patrick’s throat like the press of painful fingertips; _im supposed to love you_. This can’t be happening, the Balmist _promised_ …

“You’re not fucking funny,” says Patrick and Pete is inclined to agree, on a general level at least, but this seems more specific. Furrowed brow and pursed pout, he looks up at Patrick through the fringe of dark lashes and lank hair. “Don’t — don’t fucking say shit like that. It’s not a joke. _I’m_ not a fucking joke, asshole.”

Blink three times for good luck, inhale, and, “I’m not — what do you mean?”

“Get out,” Patrick shoves at him, Pete locks tighter, koala snug and gripping, “get the fuck out of my house, you don’t get to do this to me! I’m — I’m not a fucking _joke_! You don’t get to _do_ this to me anymore! Yes, I’m jealous. I’m fucking _jealous_ , because I’m wearing words you wrote for everyone but _me_. I want — I can’t — you just — I —”

Pete kisses him.

As the sun dips entirely, Pete seizes Patrick’s face in both hands and moulds his mouth to the shape of the declarations Patrick refuses to believe. It is an impulse like breathing, like dreaming, unbidden and unsummoned but known without introduction. Pete kisses Patrick because Pete is _supposed_ to kiss Patrick. In this moment, in the many wasted moments before and the moments that lie ahead uncharted. He rolls his tongue along lips that have fit to the sound of screaming grudge matches, tastes the teeth that gleamed smile-bright across the back of a van, across stages and airplane seating arrangements.

Patrick kisses back.

Washed dim in twilight, they kiss around the weight of words whispered between them on breath stolen from one another’s mouths. _I love you, I love you, I love you_. A litany of a love story untold and bottled, suddenly set free like summershine soda bottles and kissed to skin around shy smiles. Pete feels each curve of Patrick’s lips, each slide of slick teeth against skin as he grins senselessly into the line of Pete’s throat.

They are fumbling, stumbling over one another and the cast of cotton and denim (so much, Patrick is wearing _so much_ and Pete is fevered with the need to touch him, bare and burning), tripping on stairs until they pause in the hallway. The threshold of Patrick’s bedroom door and two pairs of boxer briefs are all that stands between friendship and a something more Pete doesn’t, won’t, dare to name.

Patrick is golden in the streetlights filtering through the open drapes, painted from throat to toes and all that falls in between. His body has surrendered to the advance of Pete’s desperate internal monologue. Pete kisses a lyric, moves his mouth to a declaration made on MySpace when no one was watching, licks over a love note penned on a page Patrick was destined never to see.

Pete will taste each thought until Patrick adores them.

“We seem to be upstairs,” Patrick says, careful.

“We seem to be undressed,” Pete replies, confused, heart heavy in the center of his chest. Because Pete has never seen Patrick shirtless, not in the true sense of the word. Never more than flashes of pale delivered in changing rooms, the slip of marble between colors of cotton as he switches shirt for shirt. He presses the pad of his thumb carefully to the puckered round of a nipple, the pink of it shocking next to shades of gray. “Do you want…”

“Yeah,” Patrick’s nod is slow, his lip bitten tender as the thoughts Pete can no longer control creep along his jaw in black and grey, as they crest his cheekbones, and work around the flush of his lips, “yeah, I do.”

They pause, uncertain, caught in one another’s orbit but both too polite to move. Pete’s cock throbs hard enough to re-center the very basis of his gravity. Perhaps it does as, magnets realigned, polarities reconfigured and set back on their true-north course, they drift together. Pete might die if he doesn’t touch, doesn’t allow the calluses of his hands to know the curve of Patrick’s naked hips, the way his thumbs trace between the corded muscles at the back of Patrick’s thighs.

There has been no prior discussion of technicalities, no verbal exchange of contracts as to what this moment could possibly entail, what moments may stretch away from it and how they may find themselves in the moments to come. With this in mind, Pete decides to think of the moments entirely as stepping stones, individual and distinct, an unlinked pathway carved from mutual uncertainty. This will be a leap together, toes scrabbling dirty for what comes next. _Together._

He fits his hand to the shape of Patrick’s cock through cotton and squeezes. He rubs. He gluts himself greedily on the feast of flesh and ink. He fists the pink tipped curve of Patrick’s prick (he is unsure in this moment – this stepping stone – who pushed Patrick’s boxers to pool at his ankles) and licks, swallows, _tastes_ each whimpering, gluttonous groan from the fuck-flushed fullness of Patrick’s lips.

Pete pulls back to breathe, to taste his fingers – wondrous – bitter salt and earth-musk. And God, fucking _God_ , this is the taste, the smell, of Patrick’s cock. Pete is hard enough to lose consciousness, each modicum of oxygen shot from his lust-starved brain to the heavy throb of his aching, fuck-lost cock.

He licks along the length of his fingers as Patrick moans and begs for _yes, yes, that, THAT_ , with eyes trained on Pete’s mouth. So, Pete gives him _that_. He folds to his knees, bones bruised against hardwood as Patrick slams his spine to the doorframe. They’ll wear the reminders of this tomorrow, a canvas of smudged technicolor bruises standing testament to their devotion.

He parts his lips and, eyes unblinking, takes Patrick’s cock along the length of his tongue and the ridged, wanting roof of his mouth.

The noise Patrick makes could conjure cardiac arrest, Pete is sure of it, his pulse hissing static as it races the length of his spine, pooling sparks in the base of his skull. He sucks, slow, draws the taste that mirrors the smell of his hand, the leak of pre-come and tang of hard cock caught in red-gold curls. Patrick holds him, guides him, loose fist knotted at his nape, the other skimming tattooed knuckles along the curve of Pete’s jaw as he moves, hips, hands and Pete’s greedy, grasping mouth.

Tender tip of his bruised-raw cock throbbing a beat with his pulse, with the dip of his tongue along the vein-velvet length of Patrick, Pete moans. He’s made no secret in the past of a generalized distaste in sucking cock. That is a distaste that does not extend to Patrick. This cock fits to the curve of his fist, to the shape of his tongue and teeth and tender flesh as, cheeks hollowed, he sucks and waits and prays for the desperate stutter of hips. He wants to hear Patrick mold the air to the sound of Pete’s name, to feel him rock onto his toes with the high note of bitter salt coating Pete’s mouth. He wants to –

The hand at his nape slides up to his crown, tugging sharp and demanding until Pete slicks wet from the length of him, blinking lust-drunk and drool-sticky. He is wanting – aching – desperate with desire to sink around that cock once more, to take Patrick apart and reconstruct him with a love note tucked in the red rich cavern of his shuddering chest. Questioning, Pete looks up, consumed by the need currently crystalizing in his bloodstream.

“Not now,” Patrick begs, wet red mouth shining just as slick as his straining, spit-wet cock. “Not yet.”

They stagger, pushing and pulling, half on knees and fumbling for the shape of Patrick’s mattress amongst a sea of scattered clothing. They find it and collapse, they sink down and into springs and sheets and one another. They’re a mess of grasping hands, wet mouths and aching cocks that fit and flush and rub together, veined and heavy with blood-gorged need. Pete cries something wordless, head tipped back as Patrick feasts insatiable and starving on the taste of his nipples. Patrick grunts insensibly around the way Pete’s fingers find the rim of his hole.

A life, a world, a stage bright and waiting for them stands in the morning. They don’t talk about it. Pete is unsure if he possesses the ability to accurately process the existence of a world turning on beyond the walls around them. Throbbing, pulsing cock aching chafed in the prison of too-tight boxer briefs, Pete is senseless. For now, the world is them. For now, they devour. Pete is making good on his desire to taste each inked declaration, lips finding the soft swell of Patrick’s belly, teeth scraping over the points of his hip bones, tongue dragged to the heat of his gold-haired groin.

He pauses, Patrick’s once-pale thighs painted silver and spread by the breadth of his shoulders, and waits. Patrick blinks at the ceiling, shuddering on stuttering breath as he grasps, squeezes, releases the sheets either side of his hips.

There is no shyness to hide from, lost in the declarations of Pete’s unending, unwavering, unerring need scrawled and pictographed across his skin. Patrick hauls a breath, holds it, hisses it out to the tune of desire. “Do it.”

Pete does, tongue sliding, edacious, along the valley of Patrick’s ass. He teases, baring him open, skating the tip along the nerve-bold rim of his tight, pink hole. He laps and he sucks and he sinks into the taste of musk, skin, sweat caught gluttonously with the flavor of cock and leaked come.

The weight of Patrick’s heels scrapes delicious along the planes of Pete’s back, the shivered softness of whimpered moans urged by the wrap of his fist around the throb of his cock. Patrick strokes divinity into the length of his prick, scraping the scribed pad of his thumb along the wet sticky tip of himself. A finger, worked in alongside the slide of Pete’s tongue, conjures a low howl from Patrick’s lips. Another and Patrick is singing, a scale of salacious desire with each faltering huff of his burnt raw lungs.

It isn’t that Pete wants this to end — quite the opposite — but rather that he’s impatient for the conclusion as he shuffles on knees to the bracket of Patrick’s hips. It isn’t that he can’t wait but rather that he no longer _wants_ to as he urges out of his underwear and hisses his curse into the press of cock-to-cock. He wonders — half blind with the ache of it — if he no longer has skin, if he possesses anything at all between the silk-soft grey-scattered-gold of Patrick and the stinging tender stretch of his own fraught nerve endings.

Riding the curve of Pete’s fingers still buried in the heat of him, Patrick wraps their cocks in one fist, squeezing to the point it aches, to the point Pete bucks his hips and stammers a cry like a warning. His hand is circling, squeezing, warding away the urge to paint the stretch of inked stomachs with gossamered silk. He mouths along the taste of Patrick’s collarbone, the crystalled salt of sin-stained skin as Patrick fumbles, gropes, blind and needing in the drawer of his nightstand.

They pause, foiled latex held between elegant fingers. Against the ink of his eyelids, Patrick’s eyes darken desperate. He is a solid work of art now, a molded cataclysm of thoughts stretching back half a decade. The ink barely scrapes the surface, the words too innumerable to cast on one body. Pete wonders if the Balmist will start on him next.

The Balmist will run out of bodies before Pete runs out of worship.

“Are you —”

Patrick rolls the condom down the length of Pete’s wet tipped and twitching cock, fingertips lingering against the swell of his balls. Patrick trembles — so does Pete — but he doesn’t waver in his unshakable, unfaltering projection that he wants this, Pete, always.

Weight on an elbow, Pete strokes the inscribed line of Patrick’s cheek. He will never grow used to a tattooed Patrick, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love him for it. Each inch, each stretch of bedeviled skin, Pete adores with the pulsedwetmessy throb of his heart. Lubed slippery and wanting, he pushes the rubbered cap of his fit-to-burst cock to the tender pucker of Patrick’s hole.

He pauses, Patrick’s hands branding heat into his ribs, painted hips canted up, up, up, straining for more sensation, more contact, touch-starved although they’re skin flush and burning, chest to hip to toe. Sweat sticks hair sticks skin as Pete blinks into the echo of Patrick’s riptide eyes, lips hovering a breath apart. Patrick’s fingertips drive, salt-rough and demanding, into the curve of Pete’s ass, urging, urging, urging as he presses forward and… and…

“I love you,” he whispers to the love letter inked behind Patrick’s ear, the blood-gorged head of him slipping into the tight heat of Patrick’s body. Fuck, but it’s been five years, sixty months of imagining and still, he’s unprepared.

“Mmhmm.” Patrick flexes around him, a dearth of give, an abundance of fevered warmth as he sinks those fingers in harder, guides Pete deeper, greedy body grasping at the stuttering, jerking length of Pete’s lust-thick cock. “Fuck me,” he whispers, dream strung and soft, a murmured melody, “fuck me, fuck me, fucking _fuck_ me.”

Mouth breathing heat into the line of Patrick’s shoulder, licking over the ridged bump of his adam’s apple bobbing desperate in the thick column of his throat, Pete begins to move. He slides back, slides free, slides so only the tip lingers inside then pushes home. He fucks likes he’s testing the way Patrick can take it. Nails scrape ruby rawness down the length of his back, curled white bordering crimson welts and Pete is suffocating, dying, in the taste, feel, _smell_ of Patrick.

He gives, body and resolve crumbling wasted in the face of mewling cries stuttered hot into the shell of his ear. Impale and withdraw, fucking his hips into the bracket of Patrick’s again and again. Patrick’s cock curves, leaking wet and sticky, caught between the stretch of their stomachs. Pete’s fist closes around it, curled to the shape of him, thumbing over the sensitive head until Patrick shudders insensible cries beneath him, head tossed back and hair fanned golden across the crest of his pillow.

“There, _there_ ,” Patrick cries out beneath him, nails sinking indentations like cresting crescent moons into the tanned gold of Pete’s hips. Angled, precise, Pete slides against _there, there_ again, each stroke defined until Patrick is gasping, robbed wordless of breath or thought or sensible suggestion. “ _Oh_ …”

Patrick’s fingers — still quick, clever, precise — find the neglected tightness of Pete’s hole, sinking inside rough raw and unlubed but incredible. He finds it with ease, the feathered finality of that aching thrum just inside, fingertips tracing, teasing, tormenting. Pete drives forward into heat and back onto ecstasy, shivering demented between the two, an atom on the cusp of splitting.

“I’m gonna —” Pete gasps into the salted sweat jewelling Patrick’s collarbone. He is unravelling, each fibre that provides conduit overflowing and glutted, a starburst of electric sensation. “— gonna come.”

“Go,” Patrick hisses through grit tight teeth and flushed-damp lips. “God, Pete just —”

Pete comes like the world is ending.

It hits like an atomic detonation. Light first, brilliant and beautiful and awe-fucked silence framed around a wordless, soundless scream. Pete goes blind from it, momentarily at least, the ability to measure out time blown entirely from him as he grips and stills and blows apart. Then the roar, the dull, deafening throb through his ears, ringing his skull, shaking and shattering his bones to dust as he fucks and ruts his desperate, grasping hips into Patrick. Pete is snapped, broken, torn down his seams and scattered, dust on wind, as the pulsing pound of it picks up his pulse and shakes him apart on screaming, fucked-raw nerve endings.

Still desperate, still fucking _insatiable_ for the man beneath him, Pete presses his nose to the salt-tang fuzz of a copper-gold sideburn and strokes the fuck-flushed cock in his hand. Patrick comes in a handful of strokes, body locking, rigid grasping greed around the sensitised, stung-raw length of Pete’s prick still buried within him as he stripes their stomachs pearl over ink.

The music in his cry will torment every song Pete tries to write for the next four lifetimes, at least.

They lie, bathed in forever, trembled with fucked-out bliss and breathe through one another’s lungs. Pete is unable to decipher the beat of Patrick’s heart from his own, the deep soft sense of home filtering through arteries to veins to thread-fine capillaries and Patrick is all he can taste.

Condom wrinkled against his softening cock, he rolls to his side, to Patrick’s side, kisses bitten bruising to merge with the inked cantations of his heart spread on skin once pale and unmarred. Patrick lies on his back, staring at the ceiling until, suddenly, he’s staring at his hands, stretched out and splayed-fingered  Pete’s heart lurches left as his stomach twists right, babbled apologies spewing spring-like from his corroded vocal cords.

“I’m _so_ sorry, I thought, uh, I mean, I went back and he said — he _wrote_ and I, uh, I thought I could —”

Greyscale finger pushed flush to his lips, Patrick smiles, still beautiful scrawled up with ink he never asked for. “Shh, it doesn’t matter.”

Pete has a panic-fraught trip to St Augustine and enough consecutive hours without sleep to beg to fucking differ. He blinks, confused, and scrabbles to frame the right question with lips fumbled thick with exhaustion.

“No,” Patrick keeps his finger pressed to Pete’s mouth, “let me finish. I can live with it, with this, because it’s part of you on me. And I guess, since this is how your mind works, I’ve done the same inside of you, marked you up, painted you with things you have to share with everyone else. I can deal with it, fuck, I can _love_ it, because I love you.

“I spent five fucking years working you out, you know? I joined a band _for you_ , I gave up my drums _for you_ , I became a singer _for you_ , I walked out in front of crowds that terrified me every night _for_ _you_. And I guess — I suppose, what I’m trying to say is… Maybe I should drop the signifiers. _I’m_ for you.”

Fights fought on battlegrounds cited over lyrics aside, this is the most Pete has heard Patrick say in one breath in the entirety of their history. Delineated and deconstructed, he wraps closer, presses tighter, bruises a kiss to the shocking pink of Patrick’s lips against monochrome.

“And I’m supposed to love you,” Pete breathes, sharpie still shadowed to the line of his hip, burnt bright and pulsing.

Wound close enough to share breath and heat and sweat-tacky skin, they sleep.

Pete dreams fearless.

~*~

He wakes to pale.

Marble skin scattered copper and gold between peaked pink nipples, a thick, flushed cock tipped rose and sticky, curving to the alabaster of a soft stomach. Pete thinks _delicious_ , mouth moving soft over satin skin and muscle butter-soft in sleep.

Then, Pete remembers, jolting upright and sending Patrick to his stomach, grumbled curses hissed into feather pillows. They pause, sheets pooled at waists and eyes blinking squinted in summer sunlight streaming through uncovered windows. Pete’s dick aches sore between his legs, over-fucked and sensitive and throbbing for a second round as Patrick hisses, ass no doubt tender and raw, as he stretches stiff limbs and considers his (unmarked) hands.

“Oh,” he says.

Pete nods.

“It’s gone,” he says.

Pete nods harder.

Sheets cast aside, Pete’s eyes rove endless unmarred skin, silk scattered soft with golden hair, brushing greedy fingertips over the plush curve of his rounded ass until Patrick flops, grinning golden and delighted, onto his back. Guilt recedes like the passage of the tide on fast-forward, sped up and bursting glitter sharp and sparkling through his veins. He made it. He did it.

He, Pete Wentz, Master of Disaster, Crown Prince of Calamity, fixed it.

Bathed warm in the delight, they kiss. This is not like last night, not fraught with desperation. They kiss lazy, slow, tongues rolling sweet and wet into greedy mouths as they suck flushed lips and bite bruises to one another’s skin. Dizzy spun and laughing, Pete pulls back, hard cock demanding recognition as he blinks into bold, blue eyes and smiles.

“I love…”

He trails off. There, stained across Patrick’s chest, the skin above ribs above heart, is a line of spidered handwriting.

_I swear I’d burn this city down to show you the light._

Pete is a collapsing, burnt out supernova, a stuttering, dying star of hushed apologies. He hits the ground begging, pleading, promising solutions he can’t grasp because now, truly _now_ , he is all out of ideas. He can’t think beyond the betrayal of it, the black ink streaked like an accusation to the alabaster of Patrick’s skin, until the kiss of Patrick’s index finger meets the stuttering shape of his mouth.

“Stop,” Patrick whispers and, with no alternative, Pete does, braced for the blow. “I love it.”

Patrick doesn’t, can’t, possibly mean that. “No, you don’t.”

“I’ve seen you through breakups and breakdowns,” Patrick assures him. “I’ve lived with your questionable taste in both hoodies and girlfriends. I’ve loved you through Best Buy parking lots and fucking dick pics on MySpace. I _love_ you, asshole and if this,” he presses his fingers to the lines above his heart, “is my badge of honor, I’ll wear it with pride. Besides,” he grins, cocksure, “who else will ever see me like this, but you?”

And that, Pete supposes, as their mouths meet, tasting and tentative, is a very valid statement.

 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, it's wonderful to know what you think. Comments/kudos are so welcome. 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers
> 
> Hope you have a fab weekend (what's left of it!) and I'll see you in the next fic :)


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